Able to restore complete image of a HDD from an USB 3.0 drive?

1. I looked but I don't know which process could it be.

2. OK, that's no problem to me, I were only concerned about the safety of backup. So I can use the computer when I'm making a system image, that's great. Do you maybe know when exactly the backup tool takes the snapshot of all the files that will go into the system image? At the beginning of the backup maybe? And if I change some file druing backup it's the old version that will end up on the backup?

3. That's a pity. Well, I'm a little afraid to restore it to my PC in use. I attached the VHD file and I was able to copy files from it - I guess that means that the system image works fine. By the way, why did the backup create three VHD files? I only have one HDD, I think I've read somewhere that it saves a whole HDD into one VHD file, not a VHD file for every partition.

Again, thank you very much, I appreciate your help.

whs said:

especially not with Windows imaging which is liable to fail.

I've read that it's reliable. Thank you though.

It is fairly reliable- there have a number of problems with it here and elsewhere - but it is very inflexible.

You are doing the right thing making images.

I think whs was suggesting you may be better served using a different program to do it.

There are a couple of good free ones around.

Hi all
I don't want to Hijack the thread -- but really these days you need something a bit more sophisticated than Windows standard Backup / restore.

Considering that most people have loads of multi-media stored on computers plus other valuable data which could be either expensive to recover (music for example) or in some cases impossible then IMO IT'S WORTH EVERY CENT PAYING FOR A ROBUST FLEXIBLE SAFE BACKUP PROGRAM. (CAPS INTENDED).

Even if you are a "torrent addict" downloading many GB's of files again even if you can find them is more pain than its worth.

Decent commercial programs only cost around 50 USD and I can definitely say that these have saved me so much time in the past that I couldn't ever imagine NOT HAVING BACKUP.

I use Acronis but others are Macrium, Paragon etc. You can also use Linux products too like BRUBACKUP etc.

The FREE versions of some of these programs IMO are just too hobbled - but are certainly better than nothing.


What the commercial programs offer are things like

1) "Scheduled unattended backups" - you can run selective backups at specific times automatically.

2) "Incremental backups" - backups where only changes made since the last backup are taken, complete image backups, selective backups

3) Backups / restores can be stored on remote / network drives etc .

4) MOST IMPORTANT THEY CAN SPAN MULTI-MEDIA --- free backups invariably fail when the device you are backing up to is full. Commercial backups will just prompt you to load another piece of media - including another usb disk drive if the original one gets full. You can even specify that the backup file will get split say into 2 GB files (or whatever you want) so you could backup to 10 Zillion CD's if you wanted to !!!!!.

Actually this isn't so stupid in some cases -- In one emergency case I had to use a really old W95 computer to restore a W7 remote machine. Since the W95 computer could only read a max file size this facility was useful -- it just read the several .tib images (acronis) and restored them to the remote computer over the network. !!!!!

The commercial products will have networking incorporated so on a "bootable" restore you will still be able to access your backup file on a remote Network drive

You can also backup to different devices AT THE SAME TIME -- I always have two copies of a backup just in case of a failure -- rarely happens but IT IS POSSIBLE. Failure can occur also through non computer causes such as you dropping the disk, spilling coffee on it etc etc.

Incidentally these backups always have a bootable version so you can do a "Bare metal" recovery even if your host OS disk is totally hosed up.

BTW if you use incremental backups - make sure that you DO make a complete backup every so often -- if you need a bare metal restore you need to start with the last complete backup plus the incremental ones taken since the last full backup.

I know this might be a bit of "Horses and Stable doors" but treat it as a lesson for next time.

And any others reading this thread -- ALWAYS TAKE BACKUPS -- YOU REALLY CAN'T HAVE TOO MANY.

The time (and money) you save is YOURS.

Cheers
jimbo

That sounds reasonable to me, but I wonder why Acronis recommends incremental over differential?

Probably because they are smaller and quicker. Not so robust, tho.